Ratigan Boots Up for the British Army

Imagine a camera strapped to the side of your shoe, recording every move during the day’s work. The thought might not be so appealing if you’re an agency worker being pushed in and out of meetings, or if you’re on set, skipping about between shooting scenes covering the same ground all day—but throw a day in the life of a new army recruit into the mix and it’s a whole new prospect. HLA director Simon Ratigan based the treatment for his new British Army commercial Step Up (above) on the idea and here he talks about the technical filmmaking decisions involved, the challenges he faced on the job and what it was like to work with real-life paratroopers.

“When I first read the script, I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature film crew that could run around a soldier’s feet filming him’,” recalls the director, who previously shot the powerful anti-smoking commercial Mutations for the Department of Health. “It needed to be closer than a conventional moving camera could get and be able to swivel, jump, run and stop in a way that normal filmmaking would never allow. [So] I then simply started testing practical techniques that might give me the same results.”

The first practical experiment Ratigan tried was strapping the camera to an ankle, which, he says, ended up turning the world into “an intolerable rollercoaster ride”. His attention then turned to the knees, thighs and articulated mounts, which had the effect of making it look like he was filming someone with a wooden leg. Both techniques got the camera close, he explains, but not in a way that felt natural or engaging.

Eventually, he got there, as he says: “In the end, I found that filming with a lightweight camera held upside-down on the end of a monopod gave me the low level position I needed and that by having the soldier film himself, gave me the personal connection I was looking for.”

The brief for the film, created through JWT London, was to tell the story of someone who joins the Army, following them from the moment they sign up through to their deployment on the front lines. “It was to be a very real, human story; one that captured the new recruit’s emotions as well as experiences,” states the director.

Ratigan reveals that the original plan was to work with one camera operator, but in the end several people wore the boots and filmed themselves, which helped capture the variety of shots needed. Aside from that, the services of the British Army’s 3 Para Regiment were employed as they appeared as background characters, giving up their well-earned leave to help with filming. “You have to applaud their commitment,” Ratigan enthuses. “It illustrates what high expectations the Army has of its soldiers and why they commissioned a spot designed to challenge all those thinking about joining to ‘Step Up’.”

Challenges on the job, Ratigan reveals, were making the leap from home test to film set and shooting with a fast-moving handheld camera at ground level, making sure focus, exposure, composition and providing a feed for everyone to watch is all kept in tact.

However, he also states that because of the nature of the subject matter and the need for the footage to reflect the raw energy of the situations being filmed, most of the filmmaking technicalities tended to look after themselves. “In fact, the less we worried about them, the better the footage became,” he says.

Filming the soldiers for real during training or combat was never an option for the team so every scene needed to be set up. The Army dictated where could and couldn’t be filmed and for the frontline scenes, shooting took place within the confines of the British Army bases in Cyprus.

“This meant creating tribal meeting points, terrorist compounds and active warzones using a few breezeblock walls and an area of scrubland,” Ratigan explains. “Thankfully, we were shooting at a very low angle and up close to the boots, so we could create realistic depth and scale with some clever art direction and a few extra soldiers.”

In light of recent news that the Ministry of Defence is cutting numbers, a recruitment campaign such as JWT’s will come as a surprise to most, with up to 5,000 set to lose their roles in the coming weeks. However, despite that fact, the argument that the forces need to remain adaptable and full of fresh new blood remains.

While Ratigan has proved more than able to overcome complex filmmaking challenges, he doesn’t claim to understand the politics of the armed forces: “Why the Army is recruiting soldiers and simultaneously laying them off, I’ll never know.”

Check out the making of here.